Posts Tagged ‘kerala’

As soon as you leave our planet’s atmosphere there is no longer a medium to carry sound waves propagating from your vocal chord. Only pristine silence awaits you in the heavens. This is not so in our natural habitat though. Visual and auditory pollution is rising incrementally. Our infotainment obsessed culture is to blame for inadvertently creating Huxley’s information-overloaded dystopia.

We, the present occupants of Earth are participants in an emancipation of nascent global governance. We can no longer ignore each other. Communication has brought the entire human race coupled with all their prejudices and endowments under a singular planetary umbrella. International tension between India and Italy have been rising ever since two Italian marines providing security for a cargo ship, were jailed in Kerala(South India) for slaughtering hapless fishermen in international waters, mistaking them for pirates. The marines’ actions would have been inconsequential in earlier times.

Information percolation through various media ensured that these marines were held accountable. But staying true to binary tendencies of every component of nature, media carries along with it a potential to easily transform itself between news-carriers and news-makers. This is evident in the recent Zee News scandal involving blackmail of steel industrialist Navin Jindal. Another instance is Diana Spencer’s car accident brought about by incessant papparazi giving chase to the royal divorcée’s boyfriend’s limousine. As a civilization, we are being conditioned to feed up on information meted out by celebrity news casters every day of the month, every year. Huxley was right.

India is known worldwide for its nuanced absurdities and the present situation involving outing of corrupted officials in high governance deserves introspection. Coming across hard-hitting pieces written by leading houses on current affairs, one would begin to wonder what was the intended purpose of journalism while the corruption was going on in the first place, instead of gawking over all of its records. An efficiently functioning media is touted to be the watchdog of able governance. Yet we find a dog inflicted with acute Attention Deficit Disorder waking up at intermittent points and then dozing off again.

The lesson for today, my children is never give in to false representation which news reporting invariably turns out to be. We see what they want us to see. Case in point: Consider any press conference. The camera is positioned such that it hides all gathered press contingent. We are not able to witness a scene in its entirety but a dressed-up visual, amounting to eye-candy. What else do you feed mute eye-balls anyways…

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society“ – Jiddu Krishnamurti

On one side of the spectrum we have righteous patriarchs putting an end to their progeny’s life to prevent familial dishonour while at the other end of the spectrum we have incestous fathers peddling their daughter to strangers for quick money. The former is prevalent in the northern states of India while the latter is unnervingly common in the south, namely Kerala.

Movie poster of KHAP, a 2011 Hindi film, based on the Manoj-Babli honour killing case and Khap Panchayats in villages of Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, which order honour killings.

This practice of subjecting one’s offspring to death(or an horrendous life) is unprecedented. The single purpose of every living organism on this planet is the propagation of its species. Fathers are actively destroying their only chance of seed dissemination by tarnishing their daughters, which is beyond comprehension for a species that is said to be blessed with divine wisdom. At this point in time, it would be wise of us to excogigate on what exactly is being accomplished by our fathers who art on Earth.

A major fart-point(non-scientific term) of the human brain is its incapability to grasp individual exclusivity. This also extends to his environment but thats a topic for another post. The fathers are in-fact attempting to think on behalf of their children(global phenomenon). Although the author ponders on who exactly is the child in the scenario since the elder parent is unable to control his emotions just like in the case of a new-born baby. This is the second fart-point of the human brain, the inability to dissociate emotional and rational thought.

In the case of honour killings, why don’t the fathers just take their own lives if they feel that way about it? And when it comes to killing someone, no matter how you justify yourself, it is an action that can never be reinstated. This phenomenon is much more globally spread than just in our Bharat Mata.

An Iraqi woman, Noor Faleh Almaleki, 20, whose family had moved to Phoenix, Arizona, was hit by her father’s Jeep Grand Cherokee in October 2009, as she walked across a car park. She lay in a coma for two weeks in hospital before dying.

By his(Faleh Hassan Almaleki, 48) own admission, this was an intentional act and the reason was that his daughter was getting too westernized which brought shame on him and his family.

It is worrying that Kerala and Maharashtra are the two states with maximum arrests pertaining to child pornography. From 2007-2009, Maharashtra registered 27, 17 and 25 cases and for Kerala the figures were 20, 39 and 44. The fathers who peddle their children are the by-product of a predominantly patriarchal approach to marriages. The husband calls the shots and the wife stays mum. Some may argue that Kerala culture entertains some kind of matriarchal structure too but you need to understand that even in that scenario, the patriarch holds the right to veto the decisions. The only way forward is for the proliferation of ‘mutualistic marriages‘ among the population in our God’s forsaken country.

Mutualistic marriages feature a companionate relationship between the husband and wife instead of the clichéd dominant husband and submissive wife. For both the above mentioned diseases plaguing patriarchs of modern India and around the world, mutualistic marriage entails as cure. Imagine a man walking over to kill/rape his daughter and finding the lovely gaze of his wife looking at him through his daughter’s eyes. There is no better moral conditioning than this.